1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to identification of an electronic device electronically by remote access.
2. Description of Related Art
In today's competitive business environment, information technology (IT) is playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of knowledge in day-to-day business as well as personal functions. Individuals, systems, organizations, and other business assets are interconnected in this emerging economic web, and as this IT landscape grows increasingly complex, so does the need to efficiently manage IT assets, including both physical assets and data. As a result, individuals and organizations alike are now, more than ever, are recognizing the need to take control of, manage and secure their computer asset base, in order to preserve their IT investments. It becomes more challenging to protect IP assets with the increase in processing power for mobile computing devices, where more and more individuals have opted for mobile computing devices, either as replacements to their desktop units, or as additional devices for home or small business networks.
Most IT departments will support the statement that conventional asset management solutions can't accurately account for the ever-increasing population of remote and mobile users. In fact, a typical organization will lose up to 15% of its PC assets over a two year period due to PC drift—where assets are not necessarily lost or stolen, but they simply cannot be accounted for due to the many times they've changed owners or departments since first being provisioned. On average, most organizations can only accurately identify 65% of their actual PC asset base when asked to do an inventory. Best practices demands that IT know where at least 90% of PC assets are located at all times. In a response to recent corporate accounting scandals, identity theft and malicious hacking, governments are establishing regulations that force businesses to protect and be accountable for all sensitive digital information. If organizations do not effectively identify and track all of their computing assets there could be severe regulatory concerns.
For an asset tracking and/or configuration management application to undertake its tracking function, not only should it be able to resist certain level of tampering by an unauthorized user, it must also be able to accurately identify the physical electronic asset being tracked. Attempts to identify, track, manage and update PC assets and their configurations are further challenged in view of the fact that during a PC's lifecycle it will undergo hardware, software and image changes including: break/fix repairs, configuration changes, operating system reinstalls, hard-drive reformats/replacements, system crashes and user-driven configuration changes. Many of these changes will require a reinstallation of the operating system whereby the original footprint or identification of the PC asset can be disabled or removed. This change, if not diligently recorded and tracked, is the beginning of a PC asset drifting from a known state into an unknown state. These routine PC life cycle operating requirements can increase the complexity and challenge of identifying and tracking PC assets, especially those that are remote and mobile. The challenges in achieving reliable asset identification further create uncertainties in deployment of certain asset control operations, such as undertaking remote data deletion operation to remove sensitive data in a target mobile computer.
Heretofore, some computer assets have been identified by relying on firmware serial numbers. This approach is simple and relatively reliable, but hardware changes could cause misidentification. Other computer assets have been identified by software-assigned identifiers, such as serial numbers and/or names. While this approach is also relatively reliable and the identifiers can be easily assigned, it also creates opportunities for reassignment of the identifiers, such as when the device operating system is reinstalled and/or upon a hardware change, either by an authorized user or by tampering by an unauthorized user.
It is therefore desirable to develop a method for intelligently and accurately determining identification of electronic devices electronically.